Robot simulator based on VTK8.2.

Robot simulator is a standlone simulator written in VTK8.2 library. A sequence of features is already available and exposed to the user such as:

• load a robot by URDF
• move the robot in a new configuration
• visualise paths
• import point clouds
• draw paths
• draw points
• draw reference frames

The architecture of the code is structured as server/client paradigm and utilises C++14.

The server must be running for the clients to connect to it. The connection type is via TCP/IP and strict messages are used (this makes the software difficult to adopt crossplatform, more on the TODOs section).

Requirements:

This package requires the installation of the following packages. To avoid issue with the lib versioning, please follow the order.

• vtk == 8.2

Installation

Install packages:

    sudo apt install libpcl-dev nlohmann-json3-dev liburdfdom-dev liburdfdom-headers-dev

Install source:

    mkdir -p robot_simulator/build
    cd robot_simulator/build
    cmake ..

If you want to build the examples, use instead:

    cmake .. -DCOMPILE_EXAMPLE=ON

Then:

    make -j 4
    sudo make install

Getting started

#include <RKD/simInterface.h>
using namespace RKD;

int main (int, char*[])

{
    // Generate simulation interface
    simInterface simInt;

    // Load Robot
    while(!simInt.generateURDFRobot("../urdf/panda_arm_hand.urdf")){
        std::cout << "ERROR in loading the robot" << std::endl;
    }
}

Sample image

TODOs

• move messages to gRPC